Various Artists

Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983

That dichotomy of major and minor, happy and sad, haunts Ghanian music collection Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983, the second edition of the Afrobeat Airways series. Overwhelmingly the tracks are lambent and melancholy, sunsets made sonic.

In his introductory essay to Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983, Afropop Worldwide editor Banning Eyre interviews some of the compilation’s featured artists, including the legendary Ghanaian guitarist and bandleader Ebo Taylor. Tracing the roots of his nation’s music, Taylor notes, “When the British came and colonized this country, there was an invasion also of this Westminster Abbey kind of music, written in the major key, hymns like ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past.’ So Ghanaians, naturally, adopted that kind of harmony; it became part of our lives.” Hearing James Brown in the late 60s, Taylor adds, reminded a generation of Ghanaian musicians that lamentation was just as potent as exultation.

That dichotomy of major and minor, happy and sad, haunts Return Flight. Overwhelmingly the tracks are lambent and melancholy, sunsets made sonic. Still, they teem. Swarms of organ notes and stinging guitar licks turn the African Brothers’ “Wope Me A Ka”—one of the most irrepressible tracks on the 13-song collection—into a connect-the-dots funk-puzzle whose final form only begins to coalesce after a shuffling, skeletal break. It’s straight out of the Fela Kuti fake book, but the Ghanaian artists on Return Flight draw straight from the same source that their iconic Nigerian inspiration did: highlife, born and bred in Ghana. Here, though, highlife’s polyrhythms and jazzy brass cast long shadows. “God is Love” by Complex Soundz may share the gospel luminosity that informs much highlife, but it dangles from a downward-spiralling, almost Santana-like chord pattern that feels more apocalyptic than ecstatic.

Shades of the sacred pop up elsewhere—most blatantly in Los Issufu and His Moslems’ “Kana Soro”—but the chanted prayers bob on choppy waves of organ-jazz, sermons in a bottle. Unlike its excellent predecessor, Afrobeat Airways: Ghana and Togo 1972-1978, Return Flight focuses exclusively on Ghana; as such, it’s impossible not to measure it against Miles Cleret’s two volumes of Ghana Soundz, which helped bring Ghanaian Afrobeat to wider attention. In fact, many of the acts included on Ghana Soundz appear on Return Flight: The African Brothers, Uppers International, Rob, Vis-a-Vis, K. Frimpong, and the relatively ubiquitous Taylor. But Return Flight compiler Samy Ben Redjeb and his Analog Africa team have plumbed even deeper, and they’ve not been found wanting. The late Frimpong—one of Ghana’s most beloved highlife singers—is represented by “Abrabo", and its bubbling Afropop guitar—not to mention Frimpong’s joyous wail—provides a welcome shaft of sunlight through the rich, murky funk that surrounds it. The most vivid example being Uppers International’s “Aja Wondo", a fugue of softly psychedelic funk that manufactures its own breathable, if smoky, atmosphere.

Taylor’s remarks in the disc’s liner notes drive home that contrast. However, they also underline the essential slipperiness, the ethereal mutability, of the music featured therein. Rob’s stark, propulsive “Loose Up Yourself” trucks in all the multiple meanings of “loose”—politically liberated, spiritually unbound, sexually free—while refusing to click on a single one, much in the same way its syncopated groove circles and never settles. Taylor’s own contribution to Return Flight is titled “Children Don’t Cry". Graceful, hypnotically cyclical, and drenched in the kind of dancefloor-coaxed sweat that leaves no tear unwashed, it pulses along in a muted minor-key. At the same time, the band’s intertwined horns uplift—even as they serve as a piercing, aching reminder of everything there is to be uplifted from.